RUTHFULLY YOURS

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is in the midst of a media blitz designed to woo male voters. And it’s not going great. On Friday, former NFL player Michael Strahan gave “Coach Walz” a thorough grilling in a Good Morning America interview. On Saturday, Walz—who loves to remind voters that he is a keen hunter—fumbled about with a shotgun in a way that didn’t exactly scream “I do this all the time.”

Walz’s clumsy push for male votes is a reminder of one of the silliest ideas going this election cycle: that the Minnesota governor is a paragon of modern masculinity whose selection as Kamala Harris’s running mate was a masterstroke that would win over male voters.

Or at least that’s what the press insisted. (See here and here and here.) One Bloomberg headline summed it up: “Tim Walz’s Masculinity Is Terrifying to Republicans.”

“Any liberal Democrat whose résumé includes football coach, military veteran, and sharpshooting hunter is a challenge to MAGA mythology,” wrote reporter Francis Wilkinson.

In an article titled “Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, and the Nice Men of the Left,” New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister praised this species of Democratic man as “newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status: happily deferential, unapologetically supportive of women’s rights, committed to partnership.” She contrasts that with the Republican Party’s view of manhood, with its “furious resentments toward women and their power, its mean obsession with forcing women to be baby-makers.”

MSNBC, meanwhile, is running an entire series on “MAGA and Masculinity in 2024” that promises to “examine the societal fallout from right-wing hypermasculinity—and the people fighting its toxic messaging by positively redefining what it means to be a man.”

Meanwhile, Doug Emhoff can be praised for “redefining masculinity” while copping to an affair with his kids’ nanny and being accused of hitting an ex-girlfriend. What was that about believing all women?

If any of this was supposed to win the votes of American men, shockingly it doesn’t seem to have worked. The latest NBC poll suggests the gender divide is as wide as ever, with a 30-point gap between the voting preferences of men and women. And in this battle of the sexes, Trump appears to have the edge, up 16 points among men compared to Kamala’s 14-point lead among women.

Things are so bad that, on Friday in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama admonished black men for not supporting Kamala Harris in greater numbers. “You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you because you think that’s a sign of strength because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”

In other words: Vote Democrat, you sexist pigs!

The optimist in me hoped this election’s cavernous gender gap might force our politicians and pundits to take the challenges American men face a little more seriously.

Because young men in this country are struggling badly. As Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, put it in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The sense a lot of young men have is not being sure that they are needed or that they are going to be needed by their families, by their communities, by society.”

He’s right. And yet few seem to understand this, let alone want to talk about it. No wonder their cunning ruse to win over male voters is flopping so badly.